Aretai

  • Using LLMs to clarify psychological concepts

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

    The American Psychological Association’s PsychTests database contains 38,000+ constructs and 43,000 measures, according to Dirk Wulff and Rui Mata in a new CDPS article. They write:

    Psychology has long struggled with conceptual redundancy, particularly in the form of “jingle-jangle fallacies,” in which different constructs share the same label or the same construct is described using different terms. This lack of conceptual clarity has hindered cumulative knowledge and comparability across studies and subfields. We propose that large language models can help address this issue by placing constructs into a shared semantic space, enabling the systematic mapping of conceptual overlap and clarification of taxonomies and generating clearer construct definitions. Although automation plays a crucial role, we argue that meaningful progress requires a coordinated, community-wide effort, combining computational advances with expert deliberation. Our approach provides a pathway toward greater conceptual clarity in psychology, fostering a more unified and rigorous framework for the discipline.

    The full article is here.

  • Friday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • Six million messages in a bottle have been cast into the sea since the 1950s: Lauren Collins.
    • “Professors should also stop treating the humanities as something confined to the campus. The humanities flourish in every public library, publishing firm, playhouse, concert hall, art gallery, museum, book group poetry reading, and magazine rack,” writes Eric Jager for Compact.
    • “The main thing I try to help people with is to trust that they can read less more, and to have a repertoire of questions handy as they’re reading. Focus on the how question more than the what question… — and noticing how how leads to why,” says Marilyn McEntyre to Aaron Cline Hanbury at Common Good.
    • The promise of social prescribing, according to Sean Geraghty and Mike Goldstein of the Center for Teen Flourishing, via EdNext. As of 2025, the evidence base is improving.
    • Phone bans at work: mixed results, via FT.

  • Thursday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • Richard Dawkins: are Claudia and Claudius conscious?
    • Zotero keeps improving. I’ve used it for at least 22 years.
    • Why do airlines always go bankrupt? “[W]hichever side of the integer you land on—one firm too many, one firm too few—there is some coalition of firms and customers that can profitably reorganize the market against the existing arrangement. In the language of cooperative game theory, the allocation is always vulnerable to defection by some coalition. The core is empty.” It’s cooperative game theory, says David Oks.
    • OECD TALIS 2024: “On average, teachers in the United States spend 73% of class time on teaching and learning. With a one-standard deviation increase in [general pedagogical knowledge], the share of class time spent on teaching and learning increases by 3 percentage-points on average.”
    • “The best time for us is when everybody’s looking at their feet and saying, ‘Woe is me, the world’s coming to an end,’” says Henry Kravis as KKR turns 50.

  • Wednesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • “The almost dreamlike movement of the story is at times closer to Ishiguro or even Kafka than your standard spy thriller. The trick is to give up trying to make too much sense of what’s going on and enjoy the ride – the sentences, the wisecracks, the atmosphere,” from LRB on Len Deighton’s spy novels.
    • Harvey Mansfield’s grading: award an “ironic” grade reported to the university and a “real” grade, usually much lower, reported privately to the student.
    • The moral emptiness of celebrity, via Unherd: “The [Met Gala] further reifies the hold that celebrity has over the American psyche, while conflating fashion as craft or art with fashion as spectacle.”
    • A survey of Stanford students: “Conservatives [12% of respondents], ironically, are more interested in changing institutions than any other group, even so-called progressive ones.”
    • Linguistic sloppiness may soon be stigmatized? Via Joshua Katz.

  • Tuesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • Inside the fed’s balance sheet, with John Cochrane and Darrell Duffie, close colleagues of Kevin Warsh.
    • “According to new research from Zurich Insurance, 51 percent of people aged between 15 and 19 now have a mental or behavioral disorder such as anxiety, depression or ADHD, and if present trends continue as they have, by 2030 this figure will hit 64 percent”—an “inauthentic crisis,” says Patrick West.
    • “Algorithms optimize for efficiency. Human beings are optimized by effort.”
    • John Arnold is taking on prediction markets, which grew from $2 billion in early 2025 to $23 billion as of March 2026, reports Semafor.
    • Yann LeCun, a “godfather” of AI, puts recent developments in perspective for Axios.

  • Monday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • It’s Star Wars Day.
    • Celebrating the life of James M. Houston, founding principal of Regent College in Vancouver, who died at 103; I would like to write about his profound influence on my life and will at some point, hopefully soon. Here’s a CT profile.
    • Joel Kotkin on the twilight of the Information Age: “the opportunities seem to be in the production [and maintenance] of tangible goods, which could be very good news indeed for the majority of young Americans who lack a four-year degree.”
    • An interview with Harvey Mansfield: “I believe in reading whole books” and “I have never had an honor that didn’t come from a conservative organization.”
    • Happy 10th birthday to the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard!
    • HBR explores the psychological debt of adopting AI.

  • Sunday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • JS Bach cantata for Easter 4 (Cantate): Wo gehest du hin? Where are you going? (BWV 166, Leipzig, 1724); English translation. The bass recitative: Just as rainwater soon flows away / and many colours easily fade / so is it also with joy in this world, / which many people value so highly; / even though sometimes people are seen / to be flourishing with the good fortune for which they longed / still even in the best days / quite unexpectedly the last hour may strike. And the final line of the chorale: My God, I entreat you through the blood of Christ: / just let me make a good end!
    • LIV Golf spent $5B over 4 years and is pulling the plug.
    • America 250: a calendar.
    • “Voters’ statement that [46%] they want younger candidates is, to some extent, symbolic,” says John Sides at Vanderbilt in the Economist.
    • Scott Bessent interviewed Kiril Sokoloff at 13D in 2022; Bessent has been a subscriber for 30 years.

  • “How the 2020s broke our brains”

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

    American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.

    Derek Thompson’s piece sorts through a few years of research on sadness among all populations in the Anglophone world.

  • Saturday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • On the college-educated working class.
    • Against screen-time panic: “anti-screen discourse undermines parental authority by presenting devices as a source of extraordinary risk that must be handled according to expert advice.” Note also: “sociologist Ellie Lee and her colleagues highlight…that ‘what can possibly go wrong is equated with what is likely to happen.’”
    • “In 2025, Scotland sent almost $1 billion of Scotch whisky to the US…”
    • The new oracle in Omaha?
    • The anti-Mamdani, Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute: WSJ profile.

  • Mercatus: The impact of public debt

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

    Higher public debt levels are associated with slower economic growth, particularly when debt ratios exceed a critical range. While the precise threshold varies across studies and contexts, the bulk of the evidence places it between 75 and 80% of GDP for advanced economies—a level that the United States has materially exceeded since 2020. This matters, not because debt is inherently destructive, but because its long-run accumulation imposes tangible costs: reduced private investment, upward pressure on interest rates, and heightened inflation and credit risk premia.

    Moreover, the meta-analytic estimate indicating a 3.3 basis point decline in growth for each additional percentage point of debt-to-GDP above this threshold implies a cumulative drag that compounds meaningfully over time. Even seemingly modest reductions in growth have profound implications for future living standards, economic resilience, and fiscal space.

    That’s from a paper by Jack Salmon updated twice yearly as new empirical research is released, last time on January 7. Current count is 80 studies.

  • Friday review, May Day edition

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • The case for a national assessment of flourishing and participation, via EdNext.
    • Adam Gopnik on Nina Livesey’s argument that St. Paul was a second century author? Frederiksen and Walsh don’t buy it; neither does Cardona in BBR.
    • Great to hear Rachel Aviv at Boston College last week; here’s her latest in The New Yorker. I hadn’t realized that she wrote this incisive profile of Martha Nussbaum from 2016.
    • Becca Rothfeld skewers Arthur Brooks’s latest book (to sample: “morality is not simply a matter of taste…it transcends personal preference–and getting it right matters;” and “his fatal mildness;” and “a fanatical belief in something…is far more invigorating than the all-encompassing blandness of the therapeutic imperative”)—I would love to see a rebuttal; and writes on looksmaxxing, with a nod to Thomas Chatterton Williams.
    • Emma Green explores the aspirations of evangelical women and Catholic young men, with a quote from Matt Crawford on manual work.

  • Thursday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

  • Charles III on our common sources

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    2–3 minutes

    King Charles III delivered a speech yesterday with remarkable and refreshing references to the shared moral, philosophical, and legal sources on which the United States and the United Kingdom draw. Here are a couple of excerpts from the King’s speech to a joint meeting of the US Congress.

    As I look back across the centuries, Mr Speaker, there emerge certain patterns; certain self-evident truths from which we can learn and draw mutual strength. With the Spirit of 1776 in our minds, we can perhaps agree that we do not always agree – at least in the first instance! Indeed, the very principle on which your Congress was founded – no taxation without representation – was at once a fundamental disagreement between us, and at the same time a shared democratic value which you inherited from us. Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it… So perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our Nations are in fact instinctively like-minded – a product of the common democratic, legal and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day. Drawing on these values and traditions, time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come together. And by Jove, Mr. Speaker, when we have found that way to agree, what great change is brought about – not just for the benefit of our peoples, but of all peoples.

    The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. 250 years ago (or, as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day….) they declared Independence. By balancing contending forces and drawing strength in diversity, they united thirteen disparate colonies to forge a Nation on the revolutionary idea of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. They carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment – as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English Common Law and Magna Carta.

    These roots run deep, and they are still vital. Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional Monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated – often verbatim – in the American Bill of Rights of 1791. And those roots go even further back in our history: the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances. This is the reason why there stands a stone, by the River Thames at Runnymede where Magna Carta was signed in the year 1215. This stone records that an acre of that ancient and historic site was given to the U.S.A. by the people of the United Kingdom, to symbolise our shared resolve in support of liberty, and in memory of President John F. Kennedy.

  • Wednesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • Chronic absenteeism (missing 10% or more of the school year) is an ecological problem.
    • Iris Murdoch’s new poems: “among the cobwebbed chaos of the attic they found an oak chest … containing more than 500 poems by the late novelist, mostly unpublished. The poems were in notebooks, handwritten, with multiple drafts and revisions, and it has taken nine years to transcribe and edit them into this short but intriguing selection.”
    • David Bromwich: “The understanding that was lost is how public higher education—and specifically liberal arts education—prepares you for life in a way that will serve students well in getting jobs, but also make them thoughtful citizens.”
    • The culture of Greek comedy, from BMCR.
    • “Over 100,000 accounts lost at least $1,000 on Polymarket… Prediction markets are being touted on social media as a lucrative side hustle for young Americans squeezed by rent and student loan bills.”

  • Tuesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • “Among some movie lovers, the mediocre appearance of the average new release has a name: The Netflix Look.”
    • “From seizing satellites to striking Earth from orbit — Beijing is developing dual-use capabilities in an intensifying arms race with the US,” reports FT.
    • Half of adolescents spend 10 or more hours daily on devices, with 63% preferring to follow influencers, from JAA Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
    • Students’ drive to be perfect is prevalent; this study of teachers sheds light on threats to students’ physical and mental health, relationships, stress levels, and learning.
    • The first complete English translation of Dialogues of Confucius, reviewed by Daniel A. Bell.